Sports of The Times; Players' Steroid Proposal Is Lacking In Muscle

By HARVEY ARATON

Published: August 11, 2002

TO understand how glacial Major League Baseball is when movement forward is the matter, consider this: years behind the sports industry in acknowledging that steroids so much as exist, baseball's players have proposed to tackle a possible plague with what amounts to a poll.

The eye-opening proposal was offered by the players during collective bargaining talks last week and greeted positively by owners through Friday before a setback in talks yesterday. Not long after players and former players went public with claims that steroid use is rampant, in the midst of an era that many already define with a humbling asterisk, baseball may try to answer those who say the sport is a cesspool of cheats by sticking its big enforcement toe into the water.

''And that's with anesthesia, based on the protections they seem to have set,'' said Dr. Gary Wadler, an associate professor of medicine at New York University and a member of the health, medical and research committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency.

It was major news, played in headlines and sound bites as a downright historic movement for the proud and potent Major League Baseball Players Association.

''It was, 'Players now agree to testing,' '' Wadler said, in his best anchor's voice. ''I don't want to say it wasn't a positive step. But as far as legitimate testing goes, all they have done is left home plate.''

Less than a year after Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs, even less judgmental fans hesitate to celebrate his milestone of 600 for his career, reached Friday night. Listening to the way many talk about Mark McGwire makes it sound as if he has been consigned to history's holding pen for the artificially muscled. Sammy Sosa is challenged by a well-known writer in the middle of his clubhouse to prove himself clean.

The credibility of a classic baseball staple -- the statistical linking of its generations -- has taken a high, hard one in the helmet and the sport now deigns to take two years to see if the scandal can be surveyed back under the rug.

Presuming that this plan passes in a new collective bargaining agreement, next season players would be tested one or more times merely to determine the extent of steroid use. If those results show insignificant use, a second survey would be conducted in 2004. If either survey reveals a significant amount of use, the plan would enter a second stage, a two-year phase of unannounced testing with vague punishment for those who fail.

Here is where the proposal becomes, according to Wadler, ''beyond outrageous.'' Both sides have reportedly agreed to define ''significant'' usage as more than 5 percent. But as Wadler said, ''5 percent failed tests should be perceived more as a disaster than a threshold.''

An expert involved in the Olympic testing program, speaking on condition of anonymity, called 5 percent ''an extraordinarily high figure'' and, he added, an obvious attempt to base the need for continued testing on baseball's self-serving interpretation of the results.

Besides ignoring the illegality of steroids, the 5 percent threshold reveals baseball's ignorance or arrogance on the issue. Do the math, the Olympic expert said: based on 30 teams with 40-man rosters, 1,200 players would be tested. For argument's sake, if 4 percent tested positive in 2004, that would expose 48 players -- not enough, apparently, to automatically set off the round of random testing in 2005.

''Forty-eight players is an extraordinary amount but baseball would consider it insignificant,'' the Olympic expert said, pointing out that there were only six failed tests at the Salt Lake Winter Games among several thousand athletes. By the contrived standards baseball is proposing, the Olympics wouldn't need to test anymore.

In addition, every tally must be analyzed as the most conservative estimate of the actual number of users, considering the sophisticated methods of beating the tests and the likelihood that many do not get caught. ''Every result must be considered with a multiple,'' the Olympic expert said.

Of course, the union and the owners did not even specify if the initial two-year round of testing would be unannounced.

''If it isn't, then the whole thing would be a setup just to make people think they were doing something,'' Wadler said. ''Because if the players know when the test is coming, no one is going to fail and they'll say, 'Like we said, the sport is clean.'

''The irony is that Donald Fehr knows the right way to do this. He's on the U.S. Olympic Committee and he knows that if he brought this plan in front of the U.S.O.C, he'd be drummed out of town.''

Within baseball, Fehr and his union, quite the contrary, were hailed for their conviction, for belatedly doing the right thing. The owners' chief labor lawyer, Rob Manfred, praised the players' proposal and rushed back with the owners' version -- asking for testing on androstenedione, McGwire's bottled helpers, sold over the counter but said to act like a steroid.

The owners' plan has more bite but not much. If steroids have changed baseball, they have been complicit, content to watch balls fly out of the ballparks and make the cash registers ring. With a strike date looming, the big money issues are on the table now. That is what the fight is about, not steroids, which merely represents the credibility of the sport.

On this thorny issue, it took two days for the players and the owners to get on the same page, which can only mean that this agreement will never withstand the qualitative test of time.